Current Members
Alexander (Alec) Coupe received his B. Asian Studies (1995) and MA (1999) from the Australian National University, and his PhD (2004) from La Trobe University. After completing an Australian Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2007, he taught linguistics at La Trobe University for two years before accepting a position in the Division of Linguistics and Multilingual Studies at NTU in 2009. He was tenured and promoted to Associate Professor in 2014. He is a fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and was awarded a fellowship for experienced researchers in 2016. His current research focuses on the documentation and description of languages of Northeast India and seeks to investigate the nature of their relationship (both genetic and areal) to the languages of South Asia and Southeast Asia. Specific areas of research interest include the analysis of tone systems, phonetics and phonology, the role of pragmatics in grammar, case marking systems, morphosyntax, clause linkage, nominalization, grammaticalization, language contact, and the creation of orthographies and dictionaries for vulnerable minority languages.
Randy J. LaPolla received his PhD in Linguistics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1990. He joined Nanyang Technological University as tenured Professor of Linguistics at the beginning of August, 2012, where he was also head of the Division of Linguistics and Multilingual Studies until the end of 2015. He also has a courtesy appointment as Professor of Chinese. His research focuses on the history and typology of Sino-Tibetan and Austronesian languages and issues related to the nature of communicative behavior and functional explanations for the patterns found in languages.
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0977-063X
Dr Francesco PERONO CACCIAFOCO (Ph.D. University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy, 2011) is a Senior Lecturer in Historical Linguistics at the Linguistics and Multilingual Studies Programme in NTU's School of Humanities.
His Research expertise and interests are mainly focused on Historical Linguistics, the etymological reconstruction of prehistoric Indo-European place names (Historical Toponomastics), the study of Aegean Civilizations and Scripts, the documentation of Papuan and Austronesian languages of South-East Asia, and the history of cryptology and crypto-linguistics.
An etymologist and historian of languages, he is currently working on the decipherment of Linear A, an undeciphered writing system from Crete, dating back to the Bronze Age and 'hiding' the so-called (and unknown) Minoan Language. He is also currently collaborating with his research team on the compilation of the Abui Botanical Corpus Online: Healing Plants, a dictionary collecting and analyzing the names of medicinal plants in Abui (a Papuan language spoken in Alor Island, Alor-Pantar archipelago, South-East Indonesia).
Information on Francesco's other projects can be found here.
PhD Candidate
Carmen is a PhD candidate studying Shan-Ni (or: Tai Laing), a Tai-Kadai language spoken in Sagaing region and Kachin state of northern Myanmar. Surrounded by several Tibeto-Burman languages, Shan-Ni structurally differs from other Tai languages. Her research looks into the diversity within the language, and the historical and contact processes that led to the shape(s) Shan-Ni has taken today. For her research masters at Leiden University, Carmen studied the variety of Shan-Ni spoken around the Indawgyi lake in Myanmar.
Her master's thesis is now online in the Leiden repository, available here.
Jiang Ling
PhD Candidate
Jiang Ling is a PhD candidate studying the behaviour of locative prepositional phrases (PPs) in Chinese. The word order of locative PPs in Chinese is an intriguing and significant issue, typologically and diachronically. Locative PPs occur predominantly in preverbal position in Modern Chinese, which is typologically rare for VO languages. Her research aims to adopt a diachronic corpus-based approach and trace the historical development of locative PP word order at different time periods of Old Chinese, Middle Chinese and Early Mandarin Chinese; and in doing so, propose a more fundamental and economical account that offers insight into the underlying mechanism governing the word order of PPs in Chinese.
After completing her BA Honours in Chinese from NTU and Postgraduate Diploma in Education from NIE, Jiang Ling worked as a secondary school Chinese Language teacher. She was seconded to the Chinese Unit of the Curriculum Planning and Development Division at MOE HQ and worked on the new national syllabus for primary school Chinese Language. She obtained her MA in Linguistics from SOAS, University of London in 2018
Michelle Sim Jia En
MA Candidate
Michelle is an MA student studying Fuzhou in Singapore, in particular the Minhou variety. Fuzhou is a minority language compared to other non-Mandarin Sinitic varieties in Singapore and is likely to have had influence from other varieties like Hokkien. Her sketch grammar hopes to investigate evidence of language contact where possible.
Michelle's honours thesis was on Miriwoong, an aboriginal language spoken in Kununurra, Western Australia. The language, which is non-configurational, was analysed from an information structure perspective, deviating from past literature which had adopted a structural approach. Her honours thesis can be found in the NTU repository: https://dr.ntu.edu.sg//handle/10356/76539
Tan Zhi Xuan
MA Candidate
Zhi Xuan is currently working on a sketch grammar of Seletar, the language spoken by the indigenous Orang Seletar of Singapore and Malaysia. The analysis will be based on natural texts collected from Orang Seletar currently living in Johor Bahru, Malaysia.
Zhi Xuan's NTU Final Year Project (Honours thesis) presented an analysis of aspects of the language of the Orang Seletar, namely the phonology, lexicon and polysemy. The analysis is based on a word list of 345 items collected from Orang Seletar living in Johor Bahru, Malaysia. The language is indigenous to Malaysia and Singapore, though currently it is only spoken on the coast of Johor Bahru, Malaysia. The Orang Seletar are one of Singapore’s indigenous orang laut (‘sea people’ / ‘sea nomads’) and one of the many groups of orang asli (‘indigenous people’) of Malaysia. The language is rapidly losing ground to Malay, which many consider the macrolanguage to Seletar. Seletar has non-Malay lexical items, which might indicate borrowings from Aslian and Borneo languages. However, many words seem uniquely Seletar. Her thesis can be found here.
Khoo Wei Ling, Johanna
PhD Candidate
Johanna is a PhD candidate studying Bunun, an Austronesian aboriginal language of the Bunun community in Taiwan. Her research looks into the complexity of complex verb constructions within Bunun. The analysis focuses on the morphological and syntactic behavior of complex verb constructions and is situated within the framework of Construction Grammar. Other than the morpho-syntactic aspects, Johanna’s investigation of Bunun complex verb construction also considers other influencing factors such as historical events and language contact. Underlying this approach is the belief that a community’s perception of events, cultural beliefs and attitudes are manifested in linguistic features. Previously, during her MA studies in Düsseldorf, Germany, Johanna worked on the analysis of Serial Verb Constructions in Singapore Colloquial English within the Role and Reference Grammar framework under the supervision of Prof Robert Van Valin Jr.
Other than linguistic analysis of languages, Johanna is also an educator interested in the teaching and learning of not only English but also other languages such as German. She also pays great attention to the acquisition of languages in children as she observes and analyses how her son produces language utterances with each passing day.
Joanna McFarland
PhD Candidate
Joanna is a PhD student studying Teochew in Cambodia. Teochew people have resided in Cambodia for hundreds of years but limited work has been done on their language. Her research will provide a comprehensive reference grammar of this language variety, while also examining the sociolinguistic situation of the group. Furthermore, she aims to compare Cambodian Teochew to the varieties spoken in Chaoshan and Southeast Asia. Divergences will be analyzed with respect to their relation to Khmer grammar with the purpose of determining what extent Khmer has influenced the grammar of Cambodian Teochew.
She completed her MA with Distinction in 2017 at the University of Hong Kong, where she provided a preliminary comparative analysis of Cambodian Teochew including evidence for contact-induced change.